Friday, October 23, 2015

What Does the AVERAGE Brand Logo Look Like?

PNG images are essentially a grid of values that represent colors to display. Since each cell in the grid is made up of numbers, I got curious about what it might mean to aggregate multiple PNGs. What would it look like to average two or more images? Median? Mode? Random?

To do so, I pulled the top 100 brands' logos from Best Global Brands.
Then I used the (layers of) values as inputs to aggregate in various ways.

Taking the median value results in what looks like a messy paintbrush stroke.
The mode reflects the heavy use of black.

The random one looks galactic! I like it the most...

Clearly, there is quite the uniformity in the logo design. Both horizontal and vertical symmetry are present. There is a bias towards a wider shape, similar to the dimensions of a word. Also, three general shapes tend to appear: a perfect square, a perfect circle, and the long rectangle.

Is there one agency that designed most of these? They have so much in common.

Below is the R code. It is long because it reflects the evolution of my thought process. A dash of apply could speed up the explicit naming.

Seems the page was permanently moved, I'm trying it with this link: http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2015/ranking/

You will also have to adjust line 63 to download.file(paste0("http://interbrand.com",plain.src[[i]]),destfile=paste0(d1$Brand[i],".png"),mode="wb") . And it probably works better not referencing Brand names, but filenames from the assets.